Education and Advocacy Under the CCAC Umbrella

February 23, 2013 Comments Off on Education and Advocacy Under the CCAC Umbrella

Greetings:

A short report about education and advocacy now being done also with CaptionMatch, the newest spoke on the CCAC wheel for the CCAC mission.

The CaptionMatch website and system is still in “beta” – being tested and developed further – with your feedback (thank you) – and also being used well so far, by a few.

It’s encouraging, and at the same time, we wonder if many more of you “users” (consumers, hearing or not, deaf or not) and providers (of any sort of captioning) might want to try it soon. What questions do you have?

CaptionMatch is a clearinghouse where anyone can place a “request” for captioning, and it will be seen (anonymously) by providers who are registered in the system because they like the idea of supporting CCAC activities, and have time for some new captioning/cart work. You define what sort of captioning you need and when, and advance planning is really important (weeks and months please, though some requests can be handled very quickly, even within a few days).

There’s a lot of education and advocacy going on there, by me and by users of the system. (CaptionMatch is a clearinghouse only, it’s not a captioning company). We’ve chosen to put time into this as a different way to advocate, and hopefully raise some revenue for the CCAC. The goal is the CCAC goal – to find captioning inclusion where none exists now.

We seem to be hearing from mainly “first time” users – folks who are introducing captioning or cart to new situations – new conferences, new video producers, and others. This is very gratifying – as here in the CCAC for three years, to offer encouragement and support for captioning inclusion. We welcome and also need more of you to try it as an option. We are not aiming to take you away from your long-time captioners – not at all. We hope they too will register and use the CaptionMatch system to benefit CCAC’s volunteer captioning advocacy projects – to help the CCAC continue.